Ginger Beer for What Ails You

 

Spicy goodness awaits all

 

It is a dark day.  The sun is hidden by the vindictive clouds looming low on the horizon, thunder claps peal across the city and my thoughts turn to Ginger Beer.  Specifically, I’m gagging for a Dark and Stormy right about now, and seeing as the weather is such, I thought to while away the afternoon making the all important product.

   I popped out to the shops to get the few ingredients for this ultra simple, yet immensely rewarding recipe.  A bag of lemons, ones with thinner skin are better for juicing; a couple pounds of raw ginger and some sugar.  Personally, I prefer using Turbinado sugar to make this.   White sugar will do but you’ll miss out on flavour.  Demerara or a generic brown sugar adds too much molasses, muddying up the flavour and colouring the GB a bit on the brown side.  

The recipe:

1 oz of ginger juice

2 oz of lemon juice

3 oz of simple syrup

10 oz of warm water

   This is the basic ratio you’ll need to follow. Jeffrey Morgenthaler has his recipe, which is where I got the original ratio from, as well as some indispensable tips on it’s making.  Experiment away with what flavour suits you.  I generally double the ginger, decrease the citrus to get mine, but I like it a bit on the spicy side.  When it comes to the lemon, you can use anything along with it.  A few months back I made a batch of Orange Bitters and had five pounds of Seville oranges, flayed, in my fridge.   Seville oranges aren’t very nice to eat but great in cooking, they’re the traditional orange used in marmalade.  When making a batch of GB I put some of their juice in with the lemon and came out with a very nice effect.  This recipe is very adaptable to any situation.  

   One very important note: learn from my experience and measure the sugar carefully.  Play around with all the other ratios, but too much sugar will very likely cause your bottles to explode about twenty-four hours in.  A nasty thing to wake up to.  Of course, this warning is only needed if you’re going to be bottle conditioning with yeast.  

   Once you’ve mixed the GB, you have two options.  You can go the easy route and put it in a soda siphon and charge it instantly.  You may want to bugger about with the sugar, as it may be too sweet because there’s no yeast to chow down on it.

The second option, and the one I use, is to bottle condition.  Firstly you need bottles similar to the ones pictured above (courtesy of my buddy Phil and his family’s brewery).   Any “Grolsch” type bottle with swing cap should do.  You’ll want the mix a bit warm to activate the yeast.  Put in the tip of a tea spoon’s amount of yeast, close the lid and give the bottle a light shake.

   Now we wait.  Put the bottles in a warm room.  I stick a space heater into a closet to raise the ambient temperature to a bit over 20 celsius.  Any lower and the yeast will stay dormant.  Leave the bottle to sit in the warm for fourty-eight hours,  no more, no less.  A few hours less and you won’t get the carbonation, a few hours more and the yeast starts to convert the sugars to booze.  You’ll end up with a very dry bottle of crap.   Once the bottle are ready, put them in the fridge then drink up once their chilled.  

A note about yeast: I use wine yeast, champagne yeast has been recommended but I have yet to get my hands on any.  I’d love to try it out if anyone can give any clues for brewers supplies in Hogtown.  Wine yeast usually goes for about a dollar a pack and will last for several bottlings.

Finally, take out the bottle of Gosling’s rum form the cupboard. It’s been waiting so patiently for it’s mate for so long. Over ice, pour a generous portion of this black nectar and top off with a little ginger beer to taste, about equal portion if you likes your rum. Any rum will do, but it takes rum made on the English Caribbean islands to match the spice and not get over powered.
Imbibe graciously and enjoy the weather raging overhead as you watch the waves crash on the beach, or, as it were, stop caring that the closest thing to a beach near you is a slight sickly looking puddle and the fact that the hole in your boot is no substitution for bare feet on sand.

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~ by Bon Vivant on 24/07/2009.